Sits among 4 outbuildings and a 24 foot, round, above-ground swimming pool, on 10 beautiful acres in the Southwest Missouri Ozarks, just outside of Long Lane, MO. That's between Buffalo & Lebanon about half way. Uses a lagoon for waste water. Approximately 1200 sq. ft. of house.

And for you wild animal lovers, we occasionally have deer in the back yard. Once saw 3 standing by the swimming pool! Walking through the fields you can see where deer have bedded down.

Extremely low property taxes (apprx. $200/yr)! Lots of trees, 2 large, 1 medium size pastures with grass/hay, 2 ponds (one is year 'round, the other is seasonal). We're in a nice micro-climate that doesn't get hardly any severe weather, except once in a while. Low snowfall during the winter. Temps range from 10°F in the Winter, to 100°F in the Summer.

Good morning, ladies and gentleman. I trust that today started out well and will continue to go well the rest of the day for you. At least I hope so :-) Yeah, it's gone pretty well for me too. Haven't gotten a whole lot done except feeding the chickens and ducks, and working on updating some web pages.

I update my home page, the page that shows our home that's for sale. The upgrade to that last page was just adding a link so people can see the layout of the property, plus just fine tuning a couple of other links so if they're clicked on, a person wouldn't leave the page.

Other than that, I uninstalled System Mechanic 5. The reason I did that is because for some reason it would cause the date on the computer to change without notice. The date never changed like that until I installed that program about 6 months ago (give or take). I did a search for a solution several months ago on the web to see what else could cause that. The only thing I found were suggestions to change the internal battery. I did that with a brand new one, and it still happened, as recently as this passed weekend :-( However, if it happens again, even after the uninstall, I may re-install it - haven't decided :-)

My wife and I talked about trying "Ad-sense" by Google for Ramblemansweb, but I don't know. I was just clicking through a few page on my site, and I'm not sure enough people even go to it, to make it worth having Google put ads on my pages. The thing is though, we're friggin broke and need to do something. You know, like try anything and everything to bring in some money, even a little, but I don't know if there are enough hits on my pages to make anything.

Okay, so I've just about finished with my tea, and am just about done with this. Plus I am thinking about taking a shower (told myself at bedtime last night I would take one first thing this morning, but that hasn't happened yet). It was SO hot at bedtime last night that we had a heck of a time getting to sleep. I layed there for a good half an hour just sweating and tossing and tuning, then finally got up for a little bit. Went back to bed only to wake-up in about an hour and a half just covered in sweat. Still trying to avoid putting the air-conditioner in the living room window, because Rain thinks it's supposed to start cooling off tomorrow. If we can just make it through today, then perhaps I won't need to put the A/C in till next week. We're stalling because we're trying to save money by not having it on, but I don't know how healthy it is for me (I've got MS, for those who didn't know) to go through the days that're in the high 80's-low 90's.

Anyway, I also decided last night that since we're going to be visited by some friends on Wednesday, that I would vacuum the bottom of the pool today. The water should be warm enough now that I won't feel pain while wondering around in it. I hope so anyway. The kids having been swimming a lot the last couple of weeks, so it can't be THAT cold, can it? :-)

Sunday, May 28

I don't know if anyone's going to be this picture at first publish of this entry. I'm using the "media repository" of Zoundry. The reason I don't think you'll be able to see it at first is because although the test was able to load a sample picture to the page in the website, it failed in retrieving it. I think it might be because we don't have a fast enough connection (dial-up/49.2). So this is a test :-)

P.S. I was right, that's why I had to update the page.

Said to my wife just a few minutes ago that I "am going to write in my blog, although I have no idea what to say. I can't imagine why people would read it *just* because it's me writing it". She said, "Just ramble, that's what you do, ramble. It doesn't have to be awe inspiring, inspirational, or really all that deep even". So here I am. Are you glad you showed-up? LOL.

Today is was just HOT. No, I don't know what the outside temperature was, but I do know it was over 80 in the house all day, probably close to 90 as sweaty as I got. We are trying to hold off installed the window air-conditioner to save money on electric. Especially since we now have the pool open and the pump runs on electricity too, hooked-up to it's own pole. It's so spoiled! *grin*

On my way to burn trash this afternoon, I saw something black and fluffy laying by the trampoline. When I got closer to it I saw it had feathers. I'm pretty sure one of the momma hens now only has 8 babies. I don't know it a cat snagged it, or if it just succumbed to the eat, and the cats found it and took it over there. Or perhaps it died over there. I really have no idea. Anyway, I said a little prayer for her and sent her to cross the rainbow bridge.

The kids swam pretty much all afternoon again. And boy are they red. Rubbed some ointment on them before bed, so they should be fine. They tan pretty quickly usually, so by next Wednesday, they'll probably be brown :-)

The cats laid around pretty much all day, but that's not all that unusual. They usually don't start getting frisky until evening, when you're tired, cranky, and just want some peace and quiet. *smile*

Good morning, everyone! Hope you slept well :-) I slept okay, not long enough, but okay. Of course I'm going to take a nap after breakfast (smoothies), so that'll make up for the lack of morning sleep. *smile*

I don't know what's going on with Zoundry this time, but for some reason the font 'looks' bigger than it usually does when I type the first draft. Hmm... Don't know if I should do my usual thing and enlarge it before uploading, or leave it as it. Again, hmm... Guess I could just leave it alone. Seems that when I go and start changing things, I inadvertently mess something up that I shouldn't have. *sigh* I will change the paragraph styles so their justified though. I just think it looks more 'professional', although I suppose that doesn't REALLY matter in blogs. Does it? I mean, it's not like I'm a journalist for some high falootin' newspaper or anything. *grin*

I changed the pictures on my 'for sale' page - the ones you get after you click on the thumbnails. Now you're shown bigger ones. I did it because a good friend of mine suggested it :-) He also suggested changing the 'title' of the page, which I did. And also suggested putting links to the Realtor's email and website, which I did, of course. So, hopefully more people will be able to find the page, the listing, and buy the dern thing. *smile* It didn't take long to actually resize the aforementioned pictures, but it did take a while before I could get them uploaded. Why? Because my daughter is sharing the connection with me. While she's doing that, everything on this computer slows down, and I mean EVERYTHING. Well, the email doesn't really, but everything else. *sigh* Then I realized that this PC was doing a virus scan, and that slows things down too, so it wasn't all her fault :-) Not to mention that when I clicked 'publish' in Frontpage 2003 to upload a fixed picture (see below), I needed to upload a BUNCH of others to another web page. THEN I uploaded the new ones to the for sale site :-)

Speaking of pictures. While looking at my blogspot blog last night, I noticed that when viewing it with Internet Explorer, that it didn't look right. The entries were on the left and at the top, but the links & stuff on the right side where wayyyyyy down the page. But when I viewed it with Firefox, it looked fine. I thought that I messed something up a couple of days ago when I was "fixing" things in the template, so I kept testing changes last night, but nothing seemed to work. Then it occurred to me that I had noticed a picture that went further across the page than usual, so maybe if I made it thinner that would make the page look right in I.E., and it did. Amazing! Sometimes the fix isn't as complicated as you think it will be. LOL.

Well, I was just informed that we don't *need* to wait until tomorrow to go grocery shopping for a few "needed" things (like ketchup, nuts, etc), that we can go today. So that's apparently the new plan, so I need to finish this up, post it, and email it. Talk to you later - tater!

Friday, May 26

Good afternoon! Actually, it's now late afternoon almost evening. Okay, whatever you call almost 5:30 after 12:00 p.m. - good that! *smile*

It's been a hot yet lovely day - in the mid-to-high 80's (Fahrenheit). We went to town earlier to do a little grocery shopping and get some boxes for Rain to put her TONS of glass jars in, so we would have a bit more space for dishes :-) She filled two big apple boxes with them :-)

We also stopped and ate at McDonalds because I was starving. Didn't eat breakfast like I should've. Bad, bad man! :-) After we got home and the groceries were brought in and put away, I decided to use the last of the gas in the mower to get some mowing done. Here's a couple of pictures of the yards so you believe me. *smile*

The front yard

The back yard

You already know what my wife was doing, but do you know what the kids were up to? I didn't think so. They spent, have been spending actually, the last couple of hours swimming :-) Good day for it, it's HOT out there.

Hope you had a lovely day. Now it's just about time to feed those chickens and take the dog for a walk-about :-)

Thursday, May 25

Wednesday, May 24

Well, I didn't write anything in my journal-slash-blog yesterday for one simple reason... not a doggone thing to say. Hadn't done anything worth writing about - no crafty things, no chore type things, nothing. Reading other people's blogs that are having dramas happening kind of puts my life's things to shame. Yeah, it was me thinking, "Compared to other people's lives, mine is hardly worth writing home about". Then again, if I were to write home, it would be to myself, my wife, and my kids, and they already know what's been going on. *grin* Oh sure, I could tell that the kids went swimming, play video games, and jumped on their trampoline, but that would just be stating the normal events of any given day. So why even say anything?

Our dog Sugar is still on her mostly egg diet, and as near as I can tell is doing just fine. The reason I say she's mostly on that diet is because if we have some non wheat-based things like meat (i.e. chicken skin, steak or pork leftovers), we give those to her as well. It's only been a couple of weeks, so it's hard to "see" any changes in her weight. She seems to have about the same amount of energy as always. I don't know if she really has a lack of energy, or she's just bored so she lays around. It's not like she can turn on the TV, computer, or anything, so what else does she really have to do? She goes outside, sometimes, when one of her humans goes out for something, and wonders around with them. Rain and I take her for a walk around the inner boundaries of the property on a daily basis - at least for the last week or so, that she seems to enjoy. Well, she wags her tail a lot during the walks. *smile*

On the "new" news, I do have an appointment with a different neurologist in July, that is closer than the one I currently see, so that's good. Hopefully he's a good one. Our primary care giver picked him out for us from a list that is in the clinic's group of neurologists who specialize in multiple sclerosis. She said that she's had patients who've seen doctors in the Ferrel Duncan Clinic and he was well liked, so hopefully I'll get along with him too, as long as he doesn't push the C.R.A.B.S. drugs. I can't remember what all the letters stand for. I know one is for Avonex (I was on that one, and the side-effects sucked), BeteSeron (I think that's the last two letters). As for the "A" and "R", the names those represent escape me at the moment. *sigh* I'm wondering if he's going to want to get me to do an MRI, since our current neuro hasn't asked for one in the 5 years we've been going to her. He might want to see if the POLs (points of light) in my brain have increased, decreased, or stayed the same. The POLs are the spots of scar tissue the the MS has caused in my brain. Plus, when I was on Avonex, the insert that came with the medicine recommended an MRI every 6 months to a year while on it, which didn't happen. Don't even know if liver tests have been done. I'm thinking they probably were, because I have had bloodwork done a few times, but not sure if that was one of the things they were checking - even though pamphlets for the other medications say to do them every so often. As far as I know though, I don't have any liver problems or kidney problems. I do know that sometimes after I've been riding the lawn mower around, being bounced a bit after hitting all the holes and bumps caused by gophers, moles, and voles, that I get a pretty intense 'ache' in my lower back that feels like possible kidney pain. But maybe a lot of people get those pains after riding around bouncing for a couple of hours. I don't know.

In basketball news: The Detroit Pistons went on to the third round of the playoffs and are now in a 7 game series with the Miami Heat. Detroit beat the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Miami beat the New Jersey Nets in round two. The Dallas Mavericks won the series against the San Antonio Spurs and will play the Arizona Suns in round three of the western finals. I'm hoping to see the Pistons play the Suns in the championship series, but obviously the teams for that haven't been decided.

On a more personal note, Rain trimmed my side-burns and the hairs on the side of my head that were becoming bushy. She also trimmed off the loose ends of the hairs on the back of my head, as well has trimmed my eyebrows. I've been shaving my own face and cutting my own nose hairs, so she hasn't had to do it all. *smile*

Ticks are in full infest mode right now. No, the place in crawling with them, it's just that we are finding them (usually before they bite us) on a regular basis. We find more on the cats then anywhere else, but usually only one tick at a time. My son has brought me two this morning to take care of. One he found crawling on the memory card of his video game system, and the other was crawling on the wall. In general though, we don't have but the occasional bite from one, so that's very good! :-)

That's all I've got. The house still hasn't sold. We haven't seen our Missouri friends for several months (it seems anyway), but since I believe their college semesters are over now, we're hoping one or both of those families will come and see us soon. Their vehicles get MUCH better gas mileage than our gas guzzling van, else we would go see them. Although, we've visited them twice since they've been here, so it's their turn. *smile*

Monday, May 22

I notice that the blog I posted using Quamana 3.0 had little font, smaller than what I think is easy for everyone to read, even if their eyes aren't so good, or they're tired. Another thing I noticed is that it's hard to open an already posted blog sent to LiveJournal. It wouldn't allow me to "refresh" the post from LJ, saying LJ didn't allow that. But I know they do, because I can do it using Zoundry. So, for now, I'll be using Zoundry to post to both LJ and Blogspot. If I want the paragraphs justified, it's easy enough to edit it manually with Zoundry.

This is the 2nd post. The first one was just an announcement basically that I have on at blogspot. Right now I am using Quamana 3.0 as my blog editor/poster. The only thing I don't like about this beta version is that if you want to change the font of your writing, you have to do it manually. If it's not too small, I may not have to change it. We'll see after this get published, since I don't know what the default size is. I like the feature of being able to "justify" the paragraphs in this version, but you can't in 2.0. Gain something, losing something, depending on which version you use. And yes, I did send an email to support :-)

Another thing that version 2.0 has that 3.0 doesn't, is the "Post Email" function. With 3.0, I'm going to have to cut and past it to anyone but the default email addy :-(

Something else I think I'll like about blogspot, is that you can set it up to automatically send the blog to one email address, so of course I set it to send to PFS :-)

I also downloaded version 2.0.2.96, that allows you to change the font size easily just like in email, but I can't get it to post to livejournal, even after trying the same settings that worked in 3.0. :-(

In both versions, as for the Zoundry program, photos are done the same way, by uploading them to a different site and linking to those photos. Photos are the reason I'm trying out blogspot. They give you 300 Mb of photo space, whereas LiveJournal only gives you a certain amount of them, and I can only post 3 more there :-(